APPROACHES TO FILM         Main Page   /  Course Syllabus  /  Discussion Forum  /   Film Pages  /   Exams & Grades

The Piano

121 min, Rated R, Color

A period love story with a strange metaphysical inclination, Jane Campion's The Piano weaves an almost indescribable spell that garnered it a raft of awards and lavish—though not unanimous—critical acclaim.

click here for the introductory slideshow

• Stewart Meets Ada  
• Ada Goes Under (clip test scene for Fall 2001)

Mail-order bride. Ada (Holly Hunter), a 19th-century Scottish woman of formidable and eccentric intelligence who hasn't spoken since childhood, is sent by her father to the wilds of New Zealand to marry Stewart (Sam Neill), a farmer whose spirit has been deformed by hardship and displaced decorum. Though speechless, Hunter is far from silent; a gifted pianist, she plays with an intensity that simultaneously enthralls and frightens the average listener.

Hunter and her gravely beautiful daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), who was conceived out of wedlock and who often acts as an intermediary between her mother and the speaking world, are set ashore on a deserted beach, surrounded by their possessions like so much driftwood. When Neill refuses to have her piano hauled to his house in the hills, Hunter becomes distraught and resentful of her husband.

Salvation comes in the form of Baines (Harvey Keitel), an uneducated Englishman gone native, who helps Neill in his dealings with the indigenous islanders.

Bartering for affection. Mesmerized by Hunter, Keitel buys the instrument and arranges with Neill for Hunter to give him piano lessons in his hut. At first, it seems that what Keitel really wants is simply to listen as Hunter plays. She reluctantly agrees, but soon Keitel proposes a more bizarre agreement whereby, in exchange for oblique sexual favors, Hunter can earn back her piano in increments of keys, beginning at a rate of one black key per visit.

Paquin no longer accompanies her mother during the "lessons," which progress from Keitel touching Hunter's leg through a hole in her stocking, to caressing her bare arms as she plays, and so on. Though Keitel progresses to more overtly sexual behavior, he abruptly releases Hunter from the bargain, frustrated and unhappy. Meanwhile, relations between Hunter and Neill have remained strained, and the marriage has not been consummated.

The cost of jealousy. After having been initially revolted by Keitel, Hunter finally returns to his hut and, when he tells her that he loves her, sleeps with him. Neill, who has been made suspicious by some of Paquin's comments, spies on the couple and becomes enraged. He later imprisons Hunter inside their home, preventing her from making a second visit to Keitel—something Keitel had told her she would have to do to prove her love for him.

Some time later, having made efforts to be tender toward Neill and having promised that she will not visit Keitel, Hunter is released, and sends Paquin to deliver to Keitel a piano key inscribed with a love message. Paquin, childishly trying to gain favor with her stepfather, shows the key to Neill, who chops off one of Hunter's fingers in a rage.

When Hunter recovers, she abandons Neill for Keitel, and they leave by boat. She orders the piano pushed overboard and, caught up in the ropes that held it upright, is pulled into the water and nearly drowned. Her emergence from the sea is a rebirth. The film ends with Hunter playing again, her mutilated finger replaced by a silver one, and learning again to speak.

Unique directorial viewpoint. Co-winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and winner of Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (Campion), Best Actress (Hunter) and Best Supporting Actress (Paquin), The Piano is a film of mysterious beauty and subtle passion, set in a past so alien it might as well be another galaxy and peopled with characters so odd it's hard to believe they're works of fiction.

Writer/director Jane Campion's great gift is one of acceptance; where other filmmakers feel compelled to tie up the weirdness of the world in a neat ribbon of narrative convention and psychological explanations, she's content to examine and marvel at the wondrously strange ways in which people treat one another, the poetically eccentric accommodations they make to life's incomprehensible cruelty and flashes of brilliant wonder.

Detail through imagery. It's not that Campion is a naïve talent, an instinctive artist unaware of and/or unable to analyze what she's doing. Far from it. Rather, she's somehow managed to avoid internalizing the protocols of character development and story construction, the norms of American mainstream moviemaking that dominate the contemporary cinema.

Campion isn't interested in Ada's problems—or Baines's or Stewart's, for that matter. She's interested in them and the world in which they live—a world where beauty and brutality co-exist, for the most part harmoniously. When Ada and Flora must camp miserably overnight on the shore where they've been rudely deposited, they huddle inside a tent fashioned from Ada's huge hoop skirts; lit from within by their campfire, it looks like a giant Chinese lantern, incongruously perched by the sea. The sucking mud and tortured trees of the hills give way to a strip of silver beach on which Ada's piano looks perfectly, terribly in place, though one would be hard put to specify what place.

Campion's eye searches out the detail that makes the image, and the image that tells the story more eloquently than words ever could.

Cultural preservation. To make a film about colonial society in a post-colonial age is a balancing act, one Campion negotiates with great grace. She has too subtle an intelligence to rely on the contrast between native and alien cultures for resonance: the rituals of transplanted English society—tea parties, amateur theatricals, wedding photographs—are preserved, even if the wedding pictures must be taken on a set in the pouring rain, the bride wearing a false lace front over her own day dress.

The Maoris have adopted foreign clothes and customs as they see fit. Baines stands between the two cultures, a white man whose skin is decorated with Maori tattoos, still bound by a code of conduct he no doubt thought he'd forgotten.

The impact of repression. Though without explicit sex scenes, The Piano is intensely erotic. Repression gives sex a disproportionate power. The Maoris are untroubled by it; their children play at copulating with trees (Stewart chastises Flora when he catches her at the game), and the women comment cheerfully on men's prowess, endowments and proclivities.

But the British are possessed by sex, tormented and driven to ecstatic agony; when Ada massages Stewart's bare flesh or plays for the naked Baines, the sexual charge is almost palpable.

Awards. As the most critically acclaimed art film of 1993, The Piano earned numerous awards from prestigious international film festivals and critical groups, and won three major-category Oscars out of its eight Academy Award nominations.

Although the film lost in the Best Picture category to Schindler's List, unanimous favorite Holly Hunter won the Oscar for Best Actress for her compelling portrayal of a mute woman who expresses her fierce passion through music.

In the most memorable moment of the 1994 Oscar ceremony, young Anna Paquin charmingly accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and director Jane Campion won the Oscar for her strikingly original screenplay.

Campion lost to Steven Spielberg and Schindler's List in the Best Director category, and Stuart Dryburgh was nominated for Best Cinematography but lost to Janusz Kaminski's black-and-white photography of Schindler's List.

Veronika Jenet earned an Oscar nomination for Best Editing, and Janet Patterson was nominated for Best Costume Design, but both were again overshadowed by Schindler's List in those categories.

Reviews by

• Harvey Greenberg from Film Journal
• Barbara Quart from Cineaste
• Alan Stone from the Boston Review
• Linda Lopez-McAllister, from the feminist monthly Hers
• James Berardinelli

Questions for discussion:

1. Many reviewers laud The Piano as a successful feminist film. The fact that Ada does not speak, has no voice, is, of course, a central concern of feminist film criticism, for too many women have too long been kept silent—no less so in this medium than in any other. And The Piano seems, on the surface at least, a feminist work that provides viewers with a strong-willed female at its center. At the same time, here we see, in a disturbing but crucial scene, a gruesome mutilation, and in another, an unwilling female victim eventually exploding into passionate response to a coercive man. For some feminists this looks suspiciously like a typical "master" narrative, where "all the woman needs" is a good **** (and there’s more than one meaning that works there); feminists could argue that the film reinforces the male fantasy that what a woman wants is sexual brutality from a primitive man. What do you think? Is this a feminist film? Why or why not? What does The Piano suggest to us about misogyny, coercion, mutilation, expression, domination?
2. The character of Stewart is a vexing one, with many reviewers praising Sam Neill’s ability to render him as something more than a two-dimensional creep (and an overly-obvious symbol of simple-minded colonialism). How would you characterize Stewart? A man undone by his inability to be with a strong wife? A jealous would-be rapist and sadistic batterer? A confused, betrayed businessman and cuckold?
3. Ada seems to be practicing a form of what some call "elective mutism"—a refusal, not an inability, to speak. Clearly, this is an unusual narrative situation, in that the "narrator" remains mute through (nearly) the entire film. Why is she silent? What does her silence cost, and what does it (help) achieve? And, ultimately, what does it mean—for her, for her daughter, for women, for their daughters?
4. Given that The Piano is what Boggs calls a "period piece," set in nineteenth-century New Zealand and obviously concerned with that setting’s attendant issues of colonialism and civilization, what is the relevance of the film to contemporary issues of feminism, equality, and sexuality? What can we learn about ourselves, today, from these nineteenth-century characters?
5. Although we have yet to discuss in detail the role of music in film (see Boggs ch. 9), one can hardly avoid noticing its importance to The Piano. What are some of the functions and/or effects of Michael Nyman’s score, of Holly Hunter’s playing, and of Ada’s self-expression?
6. I’d like us also to consider what we can call the "ethnographic" perspective (an ethnography is the anthropologically-informed close study of a culture’s values, rites, beliefs, and practices). Campion, trained originally as a social anthropologist, presents us with a film that reveals (rather than "judges") a specific culture, in this case both the Maori and the British colonials. What does Campion’s film suggest to us about the cultures it studies—and, furthermore, about the values or risks inherent in such studies?
7. This is clearly a film of contrasts, binaries ripe for deconstruction: mute/voiced, male/female, native/colonial, expression/repression, imprisonment/freedom, savage/civilization. Pick one and talk: what’s the film’s take—which does it value, how, and why?
8. Since we’ve just read Boggs on symbolism, it might be worth discussing what the title tells us is central: the piano itself, as it is abandoned, sold, deconstructed, reconstructed, touched, played. What is the function of the piano in The Piano?
9. You’ve noticed that Campion is an idiosyncratic filmmaker, one who loves to provide viewers with some curious, even unsettling juxtapositions of textures and actions. Feel free to discuss the mise en scene etc. in some of the more unusual scenes, like the dog licking Stewart’s hand as he plays voyeur, or his and Ada’s tumbling through the thicket, or any other scene you found visually arresting.